At age 71, the co-founder and chief executive of SAS Institute is quite happy running the privately-held business software giant.

Retirement? That’s not going to happen anytime soon, at least not if Mr. Goodnight has his way.

Besides, the analytics technologies in which SAS specializes are seeing increased demand across a number of sectors, his company just signed a landmark pact with SAP AG and in 2013 Mr. Goodnight jumped four spots on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (he is now ranked No. 85 with an estimated net worth of US$12.8-billion.)

“I would be bored to death if I didn’t have a job at SAS,” Mr. Goodnight said in a recent interview in Toronto.

Technology buzzwords like “big data” and “analytics” may be new to some people, but for SAS, they have been the lifeblood of the Cary, North Carolina company for decades.

And while many companies are waking up to the benefits of big data — and analytics technologies which use sophisticated algorithms to comb through that data to help discover efficiencies and identify new trends — making those tools easy to use for everyone in an organization, not just the IT staff, remains a challenge for the industry.

Just as many employees had to be trained how to use a PC in the early days of the computer revolution, big data is facing a similar learning curve within many organizations.

Mr. Goodnight believes the key to helping employees throughout a company grow comfortable with analytics technologies lies in visual analytics. In effect, taking huge swaths of data, breaking it down and analyzing it, then presenting those findings in a visually simplistic way that anyone can understand and learn from.

“It allows you at last to be able to do plots and charts and correlations, anything you want to do and explore these huge amounts of data,” he said.

“Before your modellers really get started modelling and doing predictions, they really need to understand the data and when they get a huge batch of new data, this gives them an opportunity to look around and explore and begin to have an understanding of what that data is all about.”

However, while SAS and other companies continue to produce state of the art analytics technologies, Mr. Goodnight fears colleges and universities aren’t producing enough graduates with the necessary training to use these tools.

“The biggest problem we have with analytics right now is really the skill shortage among college graduates who have not been trained in it,” Mr. Goodnight said.

“That’s something we’re working with with a number of universities around the world to develop courses that can be used to train students in analytics and how to analyze large amounts of data.”

While companies in a variety of industries — including insurance, retail and health care — are increasingly turning to analytics to help make sense of the massive amounts of digital data in their databases, Mr. Goodnight says the banking system in the United States continues to be one of the biggest adopters of analytics technologies.

“Clearly the economy seems to be picking up in the U.S., so we’re seeing a little bit of the easing of the purse strings of a lot of corporations,” he said.

“We’re going to continue to see it in the banking sector, especially in the U.S. where the banks are in an incredible regulatory situation right now where they have to deal with all sorts of new regulations. We are working with them on things like risk management and being able to do risk computations at incredibly high speeds.”

In October, SAS inked a new strategic partnership with SAP, the German software giant often regarded as a chief rival. The two companies agreed to work together on products that combine SAP’s HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance) platform with SAS’s analytics technologies.

“We have a large number of customers that we have an overlap with, and they use both SAP and SAS and our customers have asked, please integrate your products so that SAS can run on top of the HANA in memory database,” Mr. Goodnight said.

“So we’re working very closely with SAP so that we can really take advantage of doing stuff massively parallel. SAP is really more into the EAP systems, and SAS is more into the heavy duty analytics, so I think from that standpoint, it’s a really good match for us to work together. Especially for our common customers who have a lot of data that is stored in the SAP systems, and a lot of it is our moving to HANA to take advantage of the in memory databases. They want to make sure that SAS supports that and runs as efficiently as possible with HANA.”